Blood Fugue

Ceza Steele is a dutiful Jewish daughter engaged to a promising medical student. But she lives in South Africa and slowly, unwillingly and all but unawares, events conspire so that she is confronted with the brutal facts of apartheid and with her own unrealized potential. While Ceza's well-to-do friends prepare for their own weddings, she takes notice of the world around her, from university demonstrations to the hushed-up death of her future mother-in-law's black servant (accidently poisoned by the mother-in-law). Finally she begins an affair with an East Indian student whose revolutionary plans include using Ceza as a pawn. This brief novel intrigues with its intimate portrait of the author's native South Africa, but its slow, seemingly haphazard progress offers few incentives to finish it. (May)